Data storage backup is mandatory in many data storage environments, and can be intensive in terms of resource requirements. Typically, backup applications read files/blocks only once, but at a very fast clip, which can cause cache pollution where the cache operates with standard discard techniques such as an LRU (least recently used) algorithm whereas the backup data is instead the most recently accessed. Further, when files are backed up it is difficult to know what the next file is and underlying prefetch algorithms tend to prefetch data based on the locality of reference, or are designed to cater to all I/O (input/output) requests, not matching the backup application since the data to be backed up may be dispersed randomly on the underlying storage.